Shaking Hands with Trees
Mid-May, and a rare hard rain has turned to snow–big gloopy flakes splatting down. Here in our northern Colorado valley, where the high plains meet the foothills of the Rockies, snow can fly even in June. By dusk, our backyard picnic table has five inches, and the foothills are glowing blue, rounded off, softened.
Good, I think. We need all the moisture we can get.
So do the ranchers and farmers just twenty or thirty miles to the east. But as darkness brings thicker snow, I start to worry about wind on those huge open spaces. Whipped up drifts can make entire herds of cattle disappear, not to mention the occasional disoriented person who goes out to help them.
I grew up a long way from here–just twenty miles from Manhattan–but I realized some time ago that by now I know this place better than anywhere else on the planet. And late-spring storms worry me.
So I remind myself that they rarely last. By noon tomorrow, drifts in my sloped gravel drive will probably be slush. By late afternoon, packs of bicyclists will again be working their way out from Fort Collins, the asphalt steaming, liquid hillsides flashing in the sun.
Then I notice how badly our big crabapple is sagging.
It’s the signature tree of our backyard, and three days ago it bloomed, its pink blossoms suddenly humming with bees. Yesterday, when I happened to duck under it, I heard what sounded like a thousand distant motorbikes at full throttle, and its breeze-lifted blossoms made me think of one of those great ideas in human history—young Mozart, say, feeling the notes of his first concerto coming on.
Just about any tree’s a great idea, in my opinion. But this crabapple, which I have yet again neglected to prune, has grown so much in recent years that its size has become an occasional danger to itself.
By 10 p.m., its limbs have bowed to the ground. In porch light, the blossoms glow faintly red, like blood, through hillocks of snow, and I’m starting to think about hidden stresses and fault lines waiting inside the wood. I keep expecting something to crack, and my heart to crack with it. Neither of us needs that, so I pull on a hooded sweatshirt and windbreaker, and trudge outside to shake hands with the branches.
There so many ways to do this with people. A hearty vice grip for good friends. For the elderly, a velvety two-handed embrace. Men in Kenya, I once noticed, offer you the airiest, most gentle handshakes, as though they’re afraid they’ll rub away your fingerprints, or theirs.
But how do I shake hands with this crabapple?
As the flakes hiss down, my neighbor Gene’s bedroom light flicks off. With a gloved hand I give one of the boughs a light Kenyan swipe. It ripples for a moment, as though waking up, shakes off its great burden of snow, then springs up so fast it mashes slush into my eyes.
I almost fall backwards, then wipe my face and laugh.
Still, limbs are probably snapping up and down the Front Range, and God knows what’s happening out on the plains. I’ve recently returned from an old growth forest in Oregon, where a biologist friend pointed out how even Douglas firs the thickness of cathedral pillars can topple in the wind. Or fracture and fall from plain old age. What living thing doesn’t eventually reach its limits?
So as I circle the crabapple, I move gingerly in and out. Hello, I almost say as I grasp each branch tip and shake.
Now and then I trigger a micro-blizzard. With a broom I sweep upside down at the higher stuff, as though I’m the wind itself corkscrewing up through the gnarled architecture of the tree’s growth. Bigger blizzards break loose and pound my shoulders.
Despite my hood, ice water trickles down my back. I shiver, but also smile as the crabapple rises limb by limb into a version of its old self.
When I’m done, I brush snow from a couple of nearby aspens twice my height. Just a few years ago, or so it seems, they were shoots in the lawn I decided to bypass with the mower.
I clean off the hummingbird feeders. Last week I heard the first whirr and click of a broad-tail. The little guy had flown a good two thousand miles to get here, but this might be his first snow. If he can make it through the night, he’ll need all the breakfast energy he can get.
Come morning and clearing skies, the crabapple’s buried again, limbs to the ground. Back outside I go. Hi, how you doing? Nothing cracks. Two days later, the broad tail’s back, and a thousand pink-inflected bees are humming like mad.
It doesn’t seem possible, but thirty years ago, I spent a school year in China, teaching English. One day, after I’d bulled through the crowds of Xi’an on a three-mile run, I paused to watch the old man who was our campus gardener re-wrap a bonsai in fine wiring. You’d think he was doing brain surgery, his fingers moved so carefully.
Very cool, I thought, even as I told myself I could never summon such mindfulness for myself. But then, I was young and didn’t give much thought to the limits of things.
